Tricentis Announces Official Launch of Flood Element

Flood Element is the newest load testing tool that we support, and it's one that's close to our heart. Here's what it is and why we think it should be part of your tool portfolio as well.

Tricentis, recognized leader in test automation by Gartner and Forrester, announced the official release of their popular open source automation engine, Flood Element.  With this release, Flood becomes the first tool to officially support cloud load testing with headless browsers at scale.

What is Flood Element?

Flood Element is a free, open source automation engine that is available under the Apache license.  Based on Google’s popular Puppeteer project, it allows users to control browsers headlessly, creating tests that follow real user paths with minimal resources used.  

Much like Selenium, the scripting language is a familiar, action oriented engine that drives user actions in the browser.  The engine has been optimized to provide 10x efficiency gains over using Selenium for similar testing.  The native language supported by Element is TypeScript, a leading implementation of JavaScript.

Why did Tricentis build Flood Element?

At Flood, we have seen teams struggle for years to implement a sound load testing practice in their organizations.   Existing tools like JMeter are a great start, but can still be too difficult for novices to use, and can struggle with complicated use cases such as single page applications.  Selenium is already being used as a browser level load testing tool with great benefit.  However, it was not built for load testing and the cost of running tests can be prohibitive in many scenarios.

With this in mind, Flood Element allows teams to execute tests with massive concurrency at a lower cost than ever before.  With the flexibility of an open source license, developers can extend Flood Element to address their specific use cases and further integrate into their environment.

How to Get Started with Flood Element?

Teams interested to explore Flood Element can do so by downloading the open source package available from the Flood Element installation page. Flood Element works on all major platforms (Windows, Mac, and Linux) and is most popularly scripted with an IDE such as Microsoft Visual Studio Code.  Teams with less scripting experience can also use Tricentis’s intelligent recorder, qTest eXplorer, to generate scripts for Flood Element using a new recording plugin.

Who is Flood Element best suited for?

Flood Element is targeted towards developers and testers with entry level experience coding in TypeScript and/or JavaScript.  Testers with experience in Selenium will find Element particularly easy to adopt and implement in their environment.  Flood Element works best with web applications that are compatible with Google Chrome, as Element works on Puppeteer which is a headless implementation of Chrome.

How much does Flood Element cost?

Flood Element is a free language that can be downloaded by anyone at no cost.  Additionally, users can add their own customizations via the open source project hosted on Github. Executing tests locally is free, with the option to create a Flood account and purchase a plan to execute tests in the cloud at massive scale.

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